The Silver Wind

by Nina Allan

  He could not see any way of telling Miranda the things he had admitted to Ray Levin. Surely that meant they were finished before they’d even begun?

  I am miserable, he thought. I’ve been wasting my life.

  I can’t stand you when you’re like this, Dora said. You’re so indecisive.

  Indecisive, Martin thought. I can’t decide.

  A memory caught him off guard like a camera flash, himself in Aunty Violet’s garden in Hastings, digging the sandy soil with a red plastic spade. There was a girl with him, a child he had met on the beach with a birthmark on one shoulder and dirty knees.

  She had tried to touch him through his shorts and he had been embarrassed but also excited. Dora had seen them and threatened to tell Violet.

  He was surprised at how much the memory of it still aroused him.

  * * *

  Martin had booked them into one of the larger hotels along the seafront, a tall white stuccoed building with sun balconies and potted palm trees flanking the entrance. Miranda had assumed they would have separate rooms, but there had clearly been some kind of mix-up. The room they were shown to had twin beds, pushed together to form a double. Twin bedside cabinets with lamps on stood to either side.

  “I’m so sorry,” Martin said. “This isn’t what I asked for. I couldn’t find anywhere with two singles. I thought we were getting a twin. We can move them apart if you like.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Miranda. “It’s no problem.”

  She could see how embarrassed he was. She wanted above all to reassure him that the confusion over the booking was not his fault, but in truth she was unsettled by the idea of spending the night in such close proximity to another human being, even if all they did in the room was sleep.

  She and Stephen had shared a room once, but they had been children. She tried to imagine what it would be like, undressing in the little bathroom with Martin just a few feet away on the other side of a flimsy pasteboard wall, but the thoughts did not come easily.

  She had no experience with men. She was what used to be called an old maid, or at least that was how Jen Lomax and Janet Carlson saw her. They couldn’t know of course about her three-week engagement to Edmund Wiley because Edmund Wiley had left the firm long before either of them started working there. She supposed someone might have told them, Scott Unsworth for instance, though she couldn’t see that it mattered much. She had never slept with Edmund. She split up with him largely because she knew she could never do so. When she thought about sleeping with Martin her mind went blank.

  “Are you sure you’re all right with this?” Martin said.

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s a lovely room.” She placed her overnight bag on the end of the bed that was closest to her. The bag was burgundy in colour and made of soft leather. She had bought it for the weekend in Oxford Edmund had been planning just before she broke up with him. The bag had never been used.

  They were not due at Juliet Caseby’s until half past three. Miranda assumed they would have lunch somewhere first, explore the town a bit. She had told Martin she would enjoy revisiting the place but in truth her memories of Hastings were not pleasant.

  They had come down for the August Bank Holiday, she remembered that. The roads were heavy with traffic and the heat inside the car close to unbearable. Stephen had not wanted to go. Once Stephen was into his teens he argued with their father more or less continuously and the two of them had started up again almost as soon as they left the house. Ronnie Coles was insisting that Stephen give up his idea of a gap year and concentrate instead on his Oxbridge entrance.

  If you let things slide now you’ll never catch up. We’re talking about an investment in your future.

  I don’t want to invest in my future. I want to live my life the way I choose.

  Stephen bought a second-hand Honda motorbike and rode it all the way from Cherbourg to Cape Town. He wanted to see the land where his grandfather had had his coffee plantation and where their own father had spent most of his childhood. He loved the place so much he never returned.

  Their father’s depression got worse after Stephen left, though Miranda suspected this would have happened anyway. People were what they were, it was no use blaming others for what happened to them.

  She remembered Hastings as a crumbling pile of bricks at the far end of nowhere.

  “Is there anything in particular you fancy doing?” said Martin.

  “Not especially,” Miranda said. “Shall we go and have a look at the sea?”

  She wished there was a way around this somehow, the awkward small talk and over-politeness that seemed to be an inevitable part of getting to know someone. Things had been all right on the train but during the taxi ride to the hotel a careful silence had developed and now it seemed they were back at the beginning.

  They locked up the room and left the hotel by a side entrance, crossing the main road to the esplanade. There was a stiff breeze blowing. A group of French kids trundled past them on roller blades.

  “Is it how you remember?” she asked. She wondered what would happen if she took his arm. She had a sudden image of Jenny Lomax in her halter-neck sundress, the way she had of squeezing her breasts together when she laughed.

  “I don’t really know,” said Martin. He shook his head. “It’s all mixed up in my mind, what was real and the games we made out of it. There were times when I was terribly bored. It would rain for what seemed like days on end. Dora didn’t mind that, she was just as happy to stay inside and read. She was able to find things to do wherever she was.”

  “But you couldn’t do that?”

  “I liked to be outside. I liked going for walks.”

  He turned to face her, his thinning hair blowing back in the wind. Suddenly he reached out and took her hand.

  “Thank you for coming with me, Miranda. I don’t think I could have done this alone.”

  She felt too surprised and overwhelmed to reply. His hand felt dry and warm, his grip firmer than she would have imagined. They walked east along the esplanade, away from the pier and towards the shingle beach known as the Stade and the network of interlinked streets that made up the Old Town. Juliet Caseby lived in the Old Town, Martin had told her. The promenade between the pier and the Stade ran parallel with the main coast road. There was an underground car park, a children’s play area with a miniature railway, a succession of run-down amusement arcades. On the whole Miranda thought Hastings both brash and tawdry, typical of so many of the older seaside resorts, places that had lost their way in the world and had yet to find a new one.

  Her mother would hate it, she knew. For some reason this made her smile. She had told her mother she was staying the night with Jenny Lomax. She wasn’t sure if Nimmie believed her or not. The idea that she might stay over at Jen’s place was preposterous, but her mother didn’t know that, she had never met any of the people Miranda worked with.

  “Why don’t you tell me about the photograph?” she said to Martin. “You said it showed someone you recognised.”

  “It was so strange,” Martin said. “I keep wondering if I imagined it.” He squeezed her hand and then let go. She wondered if her question had offended him in some way, but then saw from his face that at least for the moment he was not thinking about her at all. “There was a man who used to walk along the seafront. We didn’t see him all that often, but he was around the first summer we came here and Dora never forgot him. She was always on the lookout for him after that. He was a dwarf, and he wore unusual clothes. Straw boaters and striped velvet jackets, rather old-fashioned. Dora used to call him the Circus Man. I don’t know if it was the way he dressed that made her call him that, or whether it was because he was a dwarf and she thought dwarfs went with circuses, but whatever it was he fascinated her. Or at least he did when she was a little girl. Later on she became afraid of him. Again, I don’t know why. One time when we saw him she said she lost all the sensation in her hands. She thought he was a harbinger of doom.”

 
“You mean a bad omen?”

  “Yes. And it wasn’t like her at all, to say things like that. Dora was a rationalist. People who believed in the supernatural just made her laugh.”

  “What was she like, your sister?”

  “Oh, Dora was like no one,” he said. He stopped walking and gazed out to sea. The waves rasped over the stones. She loved the sea as she knew her father had, though she had no memory of him speaking to her about it. She wondered how different things might have been if he had lived, and supposed not very. People made their own lives, their own choices. It was stupid to blame her father for the way things were, she saw that now. She felt amazed that it had taken her so long.

  “She was brilliant at what she did, but she found the world outside her work hard to cope with,” Martin said. “She filed the best results in her year at Cambridge, but she ended up earning her living marking exam papers. She fell in love once, but the man broke it off. She needed someone she could depend on, someone she could trust without question. It turned out that person was me.” He shook his head. “I’ve made her sound pathetic, but she was fierce. Fierce in her intellect and fierce in her beliefs. But she was gentle too, and funny. I loved her very much. There are still days when I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  Miranda looked down at the ground, at the pink suede sandals she had bought for the trip, thinking that they might be sexy. They look stupid on me, she thought. Only someone like Jen Lomax could wear shoes like these and get away with it. She knew there were things she should be saying, words that would bring comfort as well as making sense of everything, but she couldn’t think of any. Martin’s sister was dead. Perhaps some essence of her still existed somewhere but probably not. She wondered what Dora had looked like, whether she had been beautiful.

  Even if she had not been, the living could seldom if ever compete with the dead.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Martin repeated. “It was so nice of you to come.”

  Nice is nice, Miranda thought. But it’s not enough.

  They ate lunch in a fish and chip shop across from the Stade. The informal atmosphere of the restaurant together with the fact that they had a defined reason for being there seemed to put Martin at ease and Miranda felt herself begin to relax. The talk from the other tables washed over her in a careless cacophony. On the pavement outside three youths stood laughing and joshing. A wide-bottomed girl in velvet track pants pressed her pink-clad buttocks against the glass.

  Her hair fell straight to her waist, the colour of brass.

  She’s like a mermaid, Miranda thought. A selkie. A fish out of water. She thought the girl beautiful, but had the feeling Jenny Lomax would not have agreed with her. As Martin rose to pay the bill, Miranda saw someone approach the girl, a child, she thought at first, then realised she was mistaken. It was a man with dwarfism, a man in a pinstripe blazer and a silk cravat. He had a tiny white dog on a leash, a chihuahua, she thought. The sight of the small man with the even smaller dog made Miranda smile.

  He patted the girl on the arm, pointing at something beyond Miranda’s field of vision. The girl laughed so loudly that Miranda could hear her through the window. She turned to look for Martin, but he had disappeared. Miranda guessed he must be in the toilet.

  By the time he returned to the table the man was gone.

  “Shall we go?” Martin said. “It’s getting on for three now. Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine,” Miranda said. “I had no idea how late it was, that’s all.”

  She took her bag and got to her feet. As they stepped out on to the pavement she glanced both ways along the street, hoping she would see the man in the blazer again, but there was no sign of him. She wanted to tell Martin what she had seen, but at the same time felt wary of doing so. The description he had given of the man in the photograph, the dwarf who had frightened his sister, seemed to match the man she had seen in the street just five minutes before. It was impossible that they were one and the same; all the laws of logic were against it. The Circus Man was thirty years ago, and this was now.

  He was more likely to be a figment of her imagination. She laughed inwardly, thinking that this was what people always said when they saw something they couldn’t explain. This was the first time she had put the theory to the test.

  I don’t know myself at all, she thought. Or at least not as well as I thought I did. The idea of herself as an unknown quantity delighted her. She wondered if Dora had been wrong, if the little man in the natty jacket was a good omen, after all.

  She reached out and took Martin’s hand. It felt right that she should do this, something that only an hour before she would have found impossible. It seemed to her that the whole world had changed. It was just that Martin didn’t know that yet.

  She felt his fingers tighten around her own.

  “Are we ready, then?” he said.

  “I think so,” she said, and smiled. She thought he was probably talking about their appointment with Juliet Caseby, but from the look on his face he could have meant something else entirely.

  The houses north of the Stade were old. Regency, she thought, and some Tudor, a marked contrast with the tottering Victorian terraces that made up the bulk of the town. Narrow cobbled lanes ran off at angles from the main streets, and Miranda caught glimpses of sunny walled gardens filled with lilacs and orange nasturtiums. There was an atmosphere of quiet seclusion, almost of secrecy, as if the beach amusements and the esplanade were just a bright facade for the real town to hide behind.

  “I don’t remember all this,” Miranda said. “I’m not sure my dad even knew it was here.”

  “I think a lot of people that come here leave without seeing the Old Town,” said Martin. “My Aunt Violet used to bring us up here sometimes. There was a second-hand bookshop Dora loved, and a hotel, higher up, where we used to have tea.”

  “I expect it feels strange, being back here.”

  “I never thought I would come back,” Martin said. “I’m glad I did, though.”

  He turned towards her, and for a second Miranda thought he was going to kiss her, just as he almost had that time in his office. But at the last moment he seemed to draw back. He feels guilty, she thought. It’s because of his sister. She wondered how it felt, to be so close to someone they had power over what you did even after they were dead.

  She did not love her father that way. She had never really felt his presence once he was gone.

  * * *

  Silcox Square was a Georgian terrace, a short run of white-painted houses that could only be reached on foot via one of the twittens. Opposite was a small patch of grass, edged with beach pebbles and seeming to belong to all of the houses simultaneously.

  Number 24 had red flowery curtains in the downstairs windows.

  “Here we are,” said Martin, and pushed the bell. The door opened almost immediately. Suddenly Juliet Caseby was there in front of them.

  “Mr Newland?” she said. “How lovely to meet you.”

  “It’s good to meet you, too,” Martin said. “This is my friend Miranda. Miranda Coles.”

  “That’s a beautiful name, Miranda,” said Juliet. “Were your parents as keen on Shakespeare as mine were?”

  “ The Tempest was my mother’s favourite play,” Miranda said. “She even directed it once, at university. That’s how she met my father. He was doing the lighting.”

  She could feel herself blushing. She could not remember ever having given so much information about herself to a stranger before. Juliet Caseby’s hair was iron grey, clipped close to her head in a style Miranda thought was called an Eton crop. Her back was straight as a metre rule. Her hands, bare of rings and covered with liver spots, were the only sign that age was starting to catch up with her.

  She is Shakespeare’s Juliet, Miranda thought. She’s how Juliet would be after Romeo has a midlife crisis and runs off to America with a girl of twenty-four on the back of his motorbike.

  Juliet Caseby winked at her and smiled. It’s as if she se
nses my thoughts, Miranda wondered. It’s as if we already know each other.

  “Do come in,” Juliet said. “I’ve been looking out some of Gran’s things, but I don’t know how much use they’ll be. I hope you aren’t going to feel you’ve had a wasted journey.”

  The interior of the house was deep and narrow, a warren of interlinked rooms, reminding Miranda of the alleys and twittens of the Old Town itself. There was a scent of wax polish, a glass bowl of cut chrysanthemums on the hallway table.

  “You know, it’s funny,” Juliet Caseby said. “Ever since Mr Newland wrote to me I’ve been finding out things about Gran that I never knew.”

  She led them through to the back, a living room adjoining the kitchen. A tea tray with a cosied teapot stood waiting on a low wicker stool.

  “Is this where she lived?” Martin said. “Your grandmother, I mean?”

  “It was my great-aunt’s house actually, Gran’s sister Joanna. Gran moved in here to look after her when she got ill. That was why she had to give up housekeeping for Mr Andrews. She ended up marrying Joanna’s doctor. That’s often the way though, isn’t it?”

  There was a photograph on the mantelpiece, a black-and-white snapshot of two teenage girls. One of them was beautiful. Not beautiful in the ordinary way like Jen Lomax. Even with her long nose and crooked mouth this young woman had the kind of looks that inspire poetry or start wars. The other girl wore glasses and a careful smile, and in her straight back and narrow jawline Miranda could easily recognise Juliet Caseby. Her friend, she realised, must be Zoë Clifford.

  Between them stood the Circus Man. He was wearing flared trousers with braces, and a pinstriped blazer, and there was a holiday air about him. Perhaps it was the pier in the background, the white horses on the incoming waves. A dog-eared poster advertised boat rides along the coast to Folkestone and Margate.

  In the photo the Circus Man looked middle aged, fifty perhaps, fifty-five. It was the same man she had seen outside the restaurant. He appeared not to have aged by a single day.